Stephen Hume: Campbell River system in the midst of stunning rebound

Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun COLUMNIST08.25.2014

Anglers line the Campbell River for an opening during an unprecedented return of salmon.

Biologist and habitat restoration specialist Shannon Anderson of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans with the Campbell River and one of the chinook habitat projects in the background.Stephen Hume

Tyee Club historian and guide Norm Lee gets his classic rowboat, a replica of the original design from the beginning of the last century, shipshape at the club’s float in the recovering Campbell River.Stephen Hume

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QUINSAM RIVER — The ominous shadow cast by an eagle in search of a thermal glides across the sun-dappled pool on this clear, ambling little tributary of the Campbell River.

The stream’s surface erupts.

A near-vertical curtain of water races the length of the shallow pool, the mist in its wake glittering briefly, a dissipating rainbow in the fierce sunlight of the noon sun.

The spray is from a vast school of salmon, holding lazily in the current at the tail of the pool, almost perfectly camouflaged against the brown background of bottom cobbles until the predator’s shadow spooks them into waves of panic.

These are pinks, the smaller precursors to the large chinook that will arrive through August and September. Coho and chum come later on the fall freshets. Meanwhile, the pinks’ return to Campbell River has been stupendous.

“There 300,000 still down in the Campbell,” explains federal fisheries biologist Shannon Anderson as we watch the curtain of water move again, this time reacting to a raven. “There are 100,000 here and another 100,000 have already gone up.”

So many pinks returned that the fish counting gate on the lower Quinsam has closed. More salmon going upstream will simply root up the spawning beds where millions of eggs have already been deposited.

The return, estimated so far at around 800,000, looks like an unofficial record, a stunning rebound for a river system struggling with habitat loss to hydroelectric dams and industrial development, and urban modifications to its riparian zones, the critical estuary and surrounding watersheds.

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The success story is due in part to the work of habitat restoration specialists like Anderson and her federal government colleagues at the Quinsam hatchery. But she’s quick to point out this is a collaborative effort.

“It’s all about collaboration,” Anderson says. “If you look at the Campbell, it’s collaboration with the community. This community has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for habitat restoration even in hard times.”

Partnering with provincial, regional and municipal governments, industry and non-government organizations like the Nature Conservancy, the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the Tyee Club and volunteers from small local environmental groups and fish and game associations, they’ve been realizing incremental recovery of the natural abundance degraded by progress.

Roderick Haig-Brown, the local magistrate and world-renowned writer about the miracle of British Columbia’s salmon resource and the rivers that sustain it — his beloved Campbell in particular — warned more than half a century ago against the long-range perils of short-range thinking in his famous essay Let Them Eat Sawdust.

But if his predictions proved prescient — the Campbell was dammed by BC Hydro in 1947 and 90 per cent of its critical estuary had been extensively modified for log dumps, marinas, float plane docks, shipyards, shopping malls and gravel extraction by 1977 — Anderson, her science and fisheries management colleagues and both private and public supporters have been steadily working to reverse some of those consequences.

“It’s the soul of Campbell River,” Tyee Club vice-president Floyd Ross told me as we gazed over the sprawling estuary from the float where club members and guides moor their classic wooden rowboats. “We came close to losing it. Now it’s coming back.”

Still, these returns are not all the result of human intervention, Anderson admits. Favourable ocean conditions are a major factor. “But when ocean conditions get better, I want to make sure the fish have something to come back to.”

It’s to see these successes that I’m out with her for a half-day hike on the river.

Among the projects: restoring the kind of gravel necessary for chinook to spawn successfully; working to enhance rather than replace wild stocks with hatchery fish; experimenting with innovative in-river incubation of eggs; putting in rearing channels where baby salmon can find food and shelter until they take to the sea; working with industry to optimize river flows for fish and to prevent riparian contamination and degradation.

This has been a humbling experience says the 50-something biologist — that rarity a native Campbell River girl. It has often been a two steps forward, one step back process as nature corrects the assumptions and misunderstandings of even the best scientist and engineers.

For example, the carefully manicured and constructed spawning bed for chinook that they refused to use — until a massive winter storm blew it out, jumbled the gravel and parked it elsewhere. Only then did it prove attractive to spawning pairs.

As we walk the river, it seethes with pinks. They roll and splash in the plunge pool below the dam. From rocky bluffs on the heavily-used hiking trails that flank the river — part of the collaboration is to make the habitat welcoming to humans, too — schools of salmon are visible circling in eddies.

“It’s important for people to see things are still alive out there,” Anderson says. And, indeed, on this sunny afternoon every exposed rock, gravel bar and clearing seems to be adorned with an angler.

Nor are only humans fishing. Fresh bear scat steams on the hiking trails, a reminder of the bigger ecology. Trout will gorge on the eggs, bird and bear-scattered carcasses will fertilize the overhanging underbrush from which insects will drop to feed the emerging fry next spring.

Think of it in investment terms, Anderson says. Pink fry weigh one quarter of a gram when they leave. Each returning salmon deposits 1½ kilos of nutrients, a return that’s about 6,000 times the original withdrawal.

We pause by one of Anderson’s projects, a massive array of boulders carefully placed to create holding and spawning opportunities for chinook. Overhead that eagle, I’d like to think it’s the same one, is now just a speck in the sky surveying the banquet below.

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